The past decade has been marked by a technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. The effect has, in turn, driven technologies that have been known and available but relatively quiescent over the years. A major one of these technologies is the Internet or Web (the two terms are used interchangeably) related distribution of documents, media and programs. The convergence of the electronic entertainment and consumer industries with data processing exponentially accelerated the demand for wide ranging communications distribution channels, and the Web or Internet, which had quietly existed for over a generation as a loose academic and government data distribution facility, reached “critical mass” and commenced a period of phenomenal expansion. With this expansion, businesses and consumers have direct access to all matter of documents, media and computer programs.
In addition, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which had been the documentation language of the Internet or Web for years, offered direct links between pages and other documentation on the Web and a variety of related data sources that were at first text and then evolved into media, i.e. “hypermedia”. This even further expanded the use of the Internet or Web. Although many Web pages are professionally designed and, thus, relatively efficient to use, there are still a great many Web pages that are poorly designed and, thus, may present a cumbersome and confusing display interface when presented to the receiving user on the standard Web browser display interfaces, e.g. GUIs (graphical user interfaces). Web browsers that have been available for over a decade as a Web document search and access tool have provided users with the means of bookmarking, i.e. saving the Web path to such documents for future reference. However, such bookmarked Web documents are presented to the receiving user in a standard all-purpose display interface that serves as a default interface. The receiving user may predetermine the values of the attributes that define this interface, and these will serve as the user's standard or default interface. Of course, as the user receives specific Web documents, he is free to change the attribute values from the default values for any specific document display. This is relatively inefficient and time consuming to do Web document by Web document.
On the other hand, the user may need to present different types of regularly accessed, i.e. bookmarked, Web documents in different formats. For example, the user may wish to view a newspaper Web page in a different format from his stock portfolio page or job related technical Web page. Consequently, there is a need to provide Web page users with the means for effectively displaying bookmarked Web documents in different interface formats.